Paris: With Pen and Pencil eBook

I noticed that the threshold of Notre Dame, like that
of St. Germain l’Auxerrois, was very much worn
away by the feet of the crowds who have crossed it
during many centuries. The organ is an excellent
one. It is forty-five feet high, thirty-six broad,
and has three thousand four hundred and eighty-four
pipes. Its power is great, and as the organist
touched some of the lower notes, the cathedral walls
reverberated with the sound.

The Porte Rouge is a splendidly sculptured
door-way. Under the arch-way there is a sculpture
of Jesus Christ and the Virgin crowned by an angel.
Behind it there are bas-reliefs representing the death
of the Virgin—­Christ surrounded by angels,
the Virgin at the feet of Christ in agony, and a woman
selling herself to the Devil. The interior of
the church abounds with sculpture of every description,
and some of it was executed in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.

There now remains only one of the old peal of bells
which used to exist in Notre Dame—­but one
has escaped the fury of French revolutions. It
was hung in the year 1682, and was baptized in the
presence of Louis XIV. and Queen Theresa. Its
weight is thirty-two thousand pounds—­the
clapper alone weighing a thousand pounds. A clock
in one of the towers is world-renowned for the intricacy
and curiosity of its mechanism. The feats it
performs every time it strikes the hour and quarter-hour,
can hardly be credited by one who has not seen them.

It is supposed that the first foundations of a church
on this spot were laid in the year 365, in the reign
of Valentian I. It was subsequently several times
rebuilt, a portion of the work which was executed in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries still remaining.
The other portions were built in 1407, by the duke
of Burgundy, and are of a deep red color. The
Porte Rouge was built under his special superintendence.
He assassinated the duke of Orleans, and built this
red portal as an expiation for his crime.

In 1831, when the church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois
was sacked, the mob crowded into Notre Dame and completely
destroyed everything within its reach, including,
among other things, the coronation robes of Napoleon.
The archbishop’s palace was next attacked, and
in one short hour all its rich stores of ancient and
modern literature were thrown into the Seine.
The palace itself was so completely ruined, that the
government afterward removed every vestige of it.
Nothing is more terrible in this world than a mob
of maddened people. And though such Vandal acts
as these cannot be defended, still it be hooves us
to remember, that the conduct of the inhabitants of
these palaces was such as to bring down on their heads
the just indignation and censure of the people.

Slowly passing through the aisles of the cathedral,
I passed again the threshold into the street.
The majestic towers and turrets were bright beneath
the gaze of the sun, and it seemed to me that I could
stand for hours to look at them. It is not so
with the Madeleine. Its architectural beauty
is great, but it is new—­it has no age.
Notre Dame has seen centuries, and is full of historical
associations, and I could have lingered about it and
dreamed over them till the sunlight faded into night.